Clock on Pentair Intelliflow

[Shblack]

Installed a Pentair Intelliflow VS pump on our pool in Sept 2017, seemed to work great. Winterized the pool, ended up not opening the pool in 2018 due to health issues. Pool is open now, two issues:
- Clock on pump controller will not remember time when we have a power outage, and we have power hits every couple of days. No sign of a backup battery in the manual.
- Get air when running at low speeds, if I drop the speed enough we loose prime. If the pump is running at high speed and I switch it off water spurts out of the strainer basket. No sign of air when operating at max RPM.

Any advice / suggestions out there?

 

[ajw22]

Installed a Pentair Intelliflow VS pump on our pool in Sept 2017, seemed to work great. Winterized the pool, ended up not opening the pool in 2018 due to health issues. Pool is open now, two issues:
- Clock on pump controller will not remember time when we have a power outage, and we have power hits every couple of days. No sign of a backup battery in the manual.

Pentair Intelliflo VF Clock Backup Battery?

My Intelliflo's clock resets to midnight if the power is disabled for more than a few seconds. Pentair customer service confirmed it should retain the time for 96 hours, and stated that if it wasn't, something was wrong with "the capacitor that holds the time." The only thing that could fix...

www.troublefreepool.com

- Get air when running at low speeds, if I drop the speed enough we loose prime. If the pump is running at high speed and I switch it off water spurts out of the strainer basket. No sign of air when operating at max RPM.

Water should not be spurting out of the lid. You have a suction air leak there. Check or replace the O ring.

 

[Shblack]

Thanks for the feedback, will check on the O-ring. Looks like the thread on the clock not keeping time died out with no resolution. Anyone know of a schematic for the drive floating around, or a source that rebuilds the drive?

 

[ajw22]

@ogdento thoughts?

 

[ogdento]

Hey Allen/Shblack,
If the tech mentioned "the capacitor that holds the time", he probably meant that there's a capacitor in the system that holds enough charge for the clock controller to run for the stated 96 hours when the pump's off. I'm not sure whether the part(s) in question are on the keypad board or the driver board.

Here's the inside of a keypad... assuming yours is similar, I don't see anything on there that would keep the controller running for 96 hours.


I've never had a peek a driver board (because it's "potted" in a load of nasty epoxy-ish material), but @DrBill might have an idea of what/where this mystery "capacitor" is... he was able to de-pot some drives with liquid nitrogen!

-Tom

 

[Shblack]

Thanks, Tom. Probably a diode between the supply and capacitor that isolates the capacitor when power goes down. Either the capacitor has failed, or the current drain on the micro-controller has gone up. Pentair probably chose this approach to avoid the hassles of making a moisture tight replaceable battery provision.